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Monday, August 13, 2012

Promotion for Firedancer

Firedancer

S.
A. Bolich

Masters
of the Elements, Book 1

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Sky Warrior Books

ISBN: 978-0615592916

ASIN: B005JMXIMG

Number of pages: 394

Word Count: 133,000

Book Description:

What do you suppose that fire
thinks about as it cooks your dinner behind its cage of containment stone?
Jetta ak'Kal knows—but no one listens to a Firedancer who has failed to protect
her assigned village from an assault by living flame.

The Ancient, the strange,
elemental fire imprisoned at the heart of the world, took her lifemate, her
reputation as the most talented Dancer of her generation, and nearly her life.
Now her clan demands she redeem herself, yet seem strangely indifferent to her
insistence that the Dance itself that has always bound the Ancient seems to be
failing. Assigned to Annam, a village with no previous experience of fire,
Jetta and her new partner, Settak, find themselves battling the naive ignorance
of the villagers, the hostility of arrogant Windriders whose mastery of air
could kill them both with the flick of a finger, and occasionally each other as
they struggle to find new and more powerful forms of the Dance.

Pursued by fire crawling up
through every crack, by a new love she does not want, and a nagging suspicion
that there is more to her assignment than her clan bothered to tell her, Jetta
must forge unprecedented alliances in this high and beautiful place before the
Ancient breaks free—for if it does, there will no longer be anything left to
fight for.

Fire rose that night. Jetta jerked awake to a deep
booming horn shivering the glass in the windows and Nuurn's voice shouting,
"Fire, Jetta ak'Kal! Fire at the storehouses!"

She scrambled out of bed, throwing a harried look
out the window. She could not see the fire but she saw a glow, the size of
which turned her stomach to knots. Ruthlessly she suppressed it and charged
down the hill. Clouds had rolled in since sunset; it was black as the inside of
Wind Point between the houses, forcing Jetta to slow down on the uneven
streets. Then a huge shadow loomed out of the night and Rununn said
breathlessly, "Follow me, ak'Kal!"

His great hand caught hers and tugged; she followed,
trusting his night vision as he wove around hummocks and ruts. Her feet were
wet and numb from the chill dew on the ankle-deep grass by the time they dashed
over the slight rise and came to the first of the storehouses. Delvers with
shovels, with buckets and picks, some half dressed, others barefoot, milled
around between her and the fire, determined to catch any spark.

"Let me through!" she shouted, pounding
both fists on the first broad back. Rununn cleared a path with indelicate
shoves of a broad shoulder and many a, "Pardon, master. Please step
aside." that would have set Jetta giggling at any other time. One Delver
turned with a sharp, angry protest, planting himself in Rununn's path. Jetta
almost shrieked at sight of Burrood.

"Remember yourself, a'Kam!" he snapped at
Rununn.

"B--ak'Kal--"

Jetta, trapped amid a towering forest of giant
Delver bodies, lost all diplomacy. "Move!" she screamed at Burrood.
"The fire--"

Burrood opened his mouth, but what he might have
said, Jetta never found out. Rununn wrapped both strong young arms around the
older Delver and simply lifted him out of the way, his face averted from
Burrood's astonished outrage. Jetta darted through that convenient hole and
halted, appalled.

Not one, but three separate fires burned on the road
and in the spring grass on the uphill verge. Settak faced the largest, an
inferno in the middle of the road roaring shoulder high with a yellow-white
core. The other two were spinning threads into the damp and verdant grass,
finding it tough going but racing to combine arms of knee-high reddish flame.

"Dancer, what do we do?" a panicked Delver
shouted at her.

Jetta gathered her wits. "Clear a line around
those two!" She pointed at the lesser fires, which would not spread
quickly in that lush grass. "And stay back!"

She ran to join Settak. Outmatched, still he bravely
stood his ground. As she came up beside him he thrust his hands out in the move
that had worked so well yesterday. The fire shied back but none of its
flickering branches sank or died. Jetta saw the failure hit him like a blow to
the gut and shouted, "Show no fear, Dancer! Take position on the other
side!"

He turned his head and saw her. Relief washed into
his face. He nodded and spun away, terrified but still game. Jetta stepped
instinctively into the Dance, straight to the fifth movement.

No retreat.

The fire roared at her, malicious to its core. She
felt its hostility as she had felt it at Firehome, at Setham. Heat blasted
toward her and recoiled; she saw it withering the grass even where fire had not
yet taken hold. Sweat glistened on Delver faces at the edge of the light. She
set them from her mind, concentrating on the ground underfoot, reaching for the
pulsing power under Earth Mother's skin. She planted both feet in the dying
heat of ruined grass, uncomfortably warm for a terrifying, endless instant in
which she could not feel the run of the fire even with it towering in front of
her. And then it came, the sweet, staggering relief of the Dance connecting her
to...everything. Everything worth protecting.

The heat faded. The searing brightness dimmed as the
air seemed to thicken into a shield around her. The acrid bite of smoke and
scorched grass no longer afflicted her nose. Jetta scarcely noticed, for the
center of the fire faded to palest yellow and then to white, and a hysth burned
there, cunning vanguard of the Ancient, defying the Dance, the Mother. Her.
Jetta set her jaw and began to dance.

The hysth roared at her, divided itself and tried to
advance on her flanks; she stopped it with an improbable leap and twist that
took her level with shocked Delver eyes. On the edge of her awareness danced
Settak in brief glimpses of random movements, out of step with her own,
disconnected, though she saw that somehow he was keeping the fire from spreading
on his side. He was not Kori; she could not expect his efforts to lock smoothly
with hers, but still it distracted her on levels she barely sensed save in tiny
jolts to the smooth flow of the energy pouring through her.

Then a malevolent intelligence assaulted her, a
driving need deep underground. The Ancient. The hysth lunged at her, breaking
out of its circle to attack the ground at her feet, burning downward, striving
to dump her into the arms of the Ancient. Dimly she heard Settak's frenzied "Jetta!"...

Author
Bio:

S. A. Bolich is a full-time
freelancer who writes on a wide range of topics ranging from travel to horses
to web design—and of course, fantasy and science fiction. A native of Washington state, she resides
there again after serving six years in Germany as an army military intelligence
officer. She graduated summa cum laude from college with a degree in history,
which she confesses was greatly aided by devouring historical fiction of every
era and kind through her formative years.
She is also a lifelong horsewoman and shares her knowledge in the
popular "Horses in Fiction" blog series at blog.sabolichbooks.com, in
which she helps writers keep their equines from falling into the trap of
Hollywood clichés.

Her first novel, Firedancer, Book
1 of the Masters of the Elements series, was released in September 2011 by Sky
Warrior Books, with Book 2, Windrider, appearing in May 2012. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath
Ceaseless Skies, On Spec, Damnation Books, and many other print magazines and
ezines, as well as the steampunk anthology Gears and Levers 1, the military SF
anthology Defending the Future IV: No Man’s Land, and the wolf-themed fantasy
collection, Wolfsongs 2. Currently she
is working on Seaborn, Book 3 of Masters of the Elements.

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About Me

The short version is: I never sleep, live on coffee and take exhausted to new levels.
The 'official' bio reads something like this:
Jacqueline Paige lives in Ontario in a small town that’s part of the popular Georgian Triangle area. No one has ever heard of Stayner, so she usually tells people she lives “near Collingwood” and no, she doesn’t ski at Blue Mountain or at all, in fact she’s not even fond of snow.